Making Conscious choices!

Where do your hard-earned dollars go and do you care? – You should!

Where do your hard-earned dollars go and do you care? – You should!

This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently – when doing our budget one of the big-ticket items on the list is our grocery bill – yep week in and week out, get that trolley and fill it up and we queue to pay for it………

Recently, I was accompanying my other half to the supermarket (usually, I avoid it like the plague as I always think I have much more interesting things to do with my time) and I realised as we were queueing we were actually in the queue for the self-service check-outs. There was only one cashier at a manned till on a busy weekend. So, as we were (or rather my hubby was) scanning all the items. I was watching the process, a staff member (security) was keeping a close eye on us checker-outerers to ensure we were doing the right thing and we sheeples were just doing it.

We know that the big supermarket chains are two of the biggest businesses in our country and we know that they employ a large percentage of the population. We also know that some of the price-wars have driven our dairy and some of our local manufacturers into the ground – this is common knowledge, but I wonder if we also question the jobs that are no longer there in the local economy and whether or not their practises balance out for the benefit they get from our purchase power. Yes, we do have all sorts of colourful promotions and rewards benefits – but I would like to see if this translates into real purposeful giving back or marketing spin.

It occurs to me as more and more of our smaller business people are pushed to the wall – there have been two in our local area just this week, that we do not seem to ask the questions or hold the big end of town accountable for their practises and that little people (sheeples – I am one of them) need to be much more mindful of where and why they spend their money where they do.

As a mum, It is important to me to get my children up and running in the world, and recently, I had to help Daughter (number 2) and partner get a mortgage to buy their first home, I realised that I had been caught napping at the wheel when I saw how much credit card and car finance debt my children had accumulated. I thought I had done all the right things e.g. invested in their education, taught them to be productive members of society who get up and go to work every day, be kind and decent people etc…..but I never realised how easy it is to get a credit card or buy a car once you have a payslip. It was up to me to help clean it all up. At the same time, we have our elders of the family invested with the same bank – so three generations dealing with one of the big banks (we are effectively borrowing back our own money) and yet there is no loyalty or peer-2-peer borrowing systems within the bank to help real families. Rather ironic when you see the kind of profits they generate and the bonuses the executives walk away with.

Yes, we peoples (sheeples) need to be more conscious of a lot of things, how we spend our time, our money, our resources and who we spend them with. If we want better we need to ask for better and that means being more aware and asking the right questions. We get wound up about silly little things like someone parking crookedly or overtaking us on the road and shrug our shoulders at some of the big things but do nothing about it. I would think a mass movement of choosing where and why we do things would have a massive effect on changing how some of the big boys might choose to do business with us in the future.

We are bigger and more powerful than we think, when, we think and act accordingly ?